i would say ele... even if they nerfed it with high levels of gear u will get capped or very close to it haste (gcd) and mastery... theorycally that would be huge in terms of dps and could justify that little nerf however enh got nerfed and even harder than ele and tbh i dont see a reason other than pvp so pve wise they wont be on a very good spot

They havent had big nerfs and playing the PTR there are a few cleave fights which will help keep Ele competitive. On the whole SoO is quite melee unfriendly and ranged are more favoured regardless.. Even if Enhance is buffed a bit, I would say go Ele.

In the end though it really depends what content youll be running. If its just LFR/Flex do what you enjoy, its not going to be a hindrance. Normal modes, it will still be fine to do what you want, although, depending on the guild they may want you to swap. Heroics, well youll be keeping two sets of gear.

Enhancement will require a lot of theory crafting to figure out how to cope with the nerfs. Elemental is fundamentally unchanged. If you want to be ready to go at 5.4 launch, Elemental is conceptually an easier spec to play. 5.4 is also unkind to melee in general. So, we shall see.

By default, ranged DPS is more desirable than melee DPS if the numbers and utility are even remotely close. There are too many fights where having more than about 5 melee DPS is a real liability, which means that melee DPS with mediocre damage are a much bigger liability to the raid than ranged DPS with mediocre DPS.

This thread makes me sad. I need a nice heals/rDPS combo that isn't Priest and I was going to check out Shammy+Druid. Sadly, everyone is saying the heals are good but Boom/Ele is bad. Not really sure what to believe or what to play any more. I even just hit 34 on my Shammy

"This one last bullet you mention is my one last shot at redemption, because I know to live you must give your life away."
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Enhancement will require a lot of theory crafting to figure out how to cope with the nerfs.

What? How do you want to overcome a 15% dps nerf by theory crafting?

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Originally Posted by Sentinel

This thread makes me sad. I need a nice heals/rDPS combo that isn't Priest and I was going to check out Shammy+Druid. Sadly, everyone is saying the heals are good but Boom/Ele is bad. Not really sure what to believe or what to play any more. I even just hit 34 on my Shammy

We can't play the spec, with the same gearing priorities, rotations, etc. as we did before. We have a lot of variations to test (talents vs. stat priorities vs. stupid trinkets) to figure out what is going to give us our best performance. Enhancement was a skillcap spec until Blizzard implemented RPPM and gave us too much synergy with the trinkets. So, yeah, in general, we're getting screwed. But they seem to think they have internal numbers reflecting a need to nerf us in T16. Either they're completely wrong, or we have some mechanics to figure out.

You see, boomkins are on par with shadows and far ahead of elementals. On top of this, shadows and boomkins get buffed, while elementals got nerfed.

If you care for raid performance, boomkin is a really nice choice.

Thank you for the insight, I'll have to read up on them some more. The reason I'm so off-put by Boomkin is because I had absolutely no problem clearing gold Proving Grounds on PTR with Ele Shaman, but kept losing in the middle of Silver with Boomkin because their AoE is garbage. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I hit every medium-health add with my empowered Xfire, then spammed hurricane/astral storm. Sadly, with 9k/tick on the hurricane, it often meant they didn't all die. Whereas with Shammy, 4 chain lightnings = everything is dead.

Guess I'll start training Boomy on PTR again. I certainly like RDruid > RShaman but EleShammy is so simple and easy

Quickedit: Also, I was using full 463 blues on my Boomkin but using the full 522 PvP set on my Shaman... Probably explains why the damage was such a huge leap.

Quickedit2: Looks like it's scaled to 463 again for pvp gear. I lost bronze proving grounds as boomkin because my aoe damage isnt enough to kill every vermin. I'm actually thinking this is a problem with the class because Boomkin scales so much with gear so they're literally incapable of doing it without CDs, unlike other classes.

Last edited by Sentinel; 2013-08-19 at 11:14 PM.

"This one last bullet you mention is my one last shot at redemption, because I know to live you must give your life away."
Your friendly neighborhood white lion.